Cats, through desert adaptation, require water as a component of their food. They also lack the metabolic pathways to efficiently process plant material, thus defining them as obligate carnivores; their food should consist only of meat, fat, bones, and organs. These are two very simple yet fundamental facts of feline nutrition. A cat is soley designed to hunt, kill, eat, and process meat. Through millions of years of evolution, cats have developed unique characteristics of anatomy, physiology, metabolism, and behavior indicative of obligate carnivores. Many feline diseases such as diabetes, obesity, urinary tract disorders, chronic renal disease, and irritable bowel syndrome can be directly attributed to low moisture, low-meat-protein, and high-carbohydrate levels that plague many of today’s commercially produced cat foods. Many cats survive on these dry, supplemented, plant-based diets but they do not thrive. This book will discuss basic feline anatomy and physiology (explaining how a cat's body metabolizes nutrients) coupled with interpreting pet food labels which will help you make healthy selections whether choosing to purchase commercial foods or making a home-prepared raw diet to feed your cat.

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lynn is a former, professionally-trained, veterinary technician and has been a feline advocate for over two decades. She has spent more than 25 years working in the fields of biology and chemistry. Lynn's experience with her own cats, one dying at nine years of age from chronic renal disease and the others diagnosed with varying medical ailments, inspired her to seek an answer to their health challenges. Diet was the key. Lynn's knowledge of feline nutrition lead to the creation of the Feline Nutrition Awareness Effort, an online venue founded to educate care-givers and advocate for optimum feline nutrition through a species-appropriate diet whether produced commercially or prepared at home.

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Being a passionate advocate for cats...and what makes them CATS, I found this book to be very informative and gives great insight into why cats are so unique physiologically. It will clearly define for you that cats are *obligate* or true carnivores. They are not small dogs, in fact dogs are facultative carnivores, not obligate carnivores like cats. There is a huge difference in the two--dogs can process plant-based nutrients, cats have very, very limited (if any) ability to do this.

There are also two great recipes for a raw diet in this book to get you started if you're interested in feeding a raw diet to your little carnivore. :) MY CRITERIA: When it comes to choosing a raw diet, choose one with NO grains and minimal veggies (stay below 5% of the diet w/veggies, if adding any at all). Also make sure it is balanced with meat AND bones or other calcium source. Feeding raw is more than just giving your cat a piece of meat--doing so will create serious deficiencies (and can lead to death) because kitties need calcium in their diet in the correct proportion to the meat. These recipes are totally a species-appropriate diet, and fit my criteria.

I've been feeding my kitties a BALANCED raw diet for over a decade. My oldest boy is 19 (2015) and still going strong. :)

Although I was already well-versed in what the book contains (and there is more info than what I shared here), most people are not. For that reason, I highly recommend this book!

This is an excellent book if you are looking for detailed answers as to why you should be feeding your cat certain kinds of food and not others. But if all you want is recipes or a feeding plan, then this might be a bit of an overkill. I highly recommend this book.

Curtis has outlined the basics of feline nutrition in this book, which is sadly misunderstood by most owners and veterinarians. Dogs, who are omnivores, and cats, who are obligate carnivores, require completely different diets. Feeding a high carbohydrate, moisture depleted diet of dry food can cause all sorts of ailments later in life, including diabetes, kidney disease, obesity, and urinary tract issues. The majority of cat owners feed a species inappropriate diet, and the cats suffer for it. I speak from experience--my cat became obese on a high end commercial dry food, and eventually developed diabetes from it. Now that he's down to a healthy weight and eating a low carb, canned commercial food, his diabetes is in remission and he is healthier than he has ever been in his life. I am actually grateful now that he is diabetic--if not for his condition I might have never educated myself in feline nutrition and went on feeding him a species inappropriate diet, and he would have suffered from other ailments. Kudos to Curtis for helping spread the word.